With the 40-year anniversary of the end of the war between Vietnam and America in a few days, the timing of this was fortuitous. Our story begins with a dinner, as many of my stories do. One of my former students, Linh (pronounced “ling’), had invited me to have dinner with her and her family. Soon they would be leaving for Newfoundland, Canada. They would be living in a small college town on the Eastern coast while her husband, Dzung (pronounced “zoong”), earned his Ph.D. At the end of this dinner they invited us to come to Bac Ninh Province (just North of Hanoi) to have a large dinner with their extended family.
Yeah. Gross, right? Vietnam has a lot to offer to the dark side of the culinary world and I’m doing my best to try all the weird cultural dishes I can whilst I am here. This week’s dish is a beating snake heart. Also included in this post will be snake organs, bones, skin, and poisonous stomach bile.
Thanks to some crafty plane ticket booking strategies, we ended up with a very extended layover in Kuala Lumpur (or KL, as the cool kids call it). I was pretty overwhelmed by all the American food chains that populated the airport. It had been a long time since I’d seen a Johnny Rocket’s. But eventually we found our way out of the airport to the train that would take us into KL.
We sailed further into the islands to a place called ‘Manta Point.’ This place was famous amongst divers for, you guessed it, manta rays. As far as I could tell, Manta Point wasn’t really an actual ‘point’, rather just a large area of water in the middle of the Komodo Islands. Our boat slowed down as we approached Manta ‘area.’ The crew leaned off the deck, scouring the clear, blue water. Then there was a shout. Off in the distance what looked like a large fin broke the surface. As we continued I could see big dark patches moving around beneath the boat and obstructing the purity of the water's light blue coloring. These were manta rays. I was so jazzed that I jumped in with no sunscreen, which was a terrible decision, but I was busy swimming through this...
We sat on the deck of the boat eating our dinner together. Nobody was speaking. We were not in good spirits. Lightning flashed silently off in the distance in all directions with increasing frequency. The coast of Sumbawa sat calmly a few hundred meters away. I watched the lights twinkle from shore, wishing I was there instead of on this boat. With the wind picking up, we could all feel the storm coming.
I was pretty infatuated with the island already as we navigated the labyrinth of strange, narrow, mossy alleyways to our ‘bungalow’ accommodations for the first night in Ubud. I was pretty fed-up with the island 2 days later as I trudged through the crowded, dirty streets looking for a motorbike in Kuta. I'm pretty sure that everyone hates Kuta. But then I was back to liking the island again later on as I road a motorbike along the winding mountain roads on the less developed Northern side of the Island.
On Christmas night, two friends and I walked into a bar in District 1 to have a beer and play a game of pool. This was maybe not the most traditional activity for Christmas night, but at least we had each other. I was the last to arrive at the pool table on the third floor of this bar because I had been distracted somewhere en route. When I walked up the stairs I was handed a pool stick and introduced to my teammate: a random guy in the bar. His name was Leonardo.
Is there even anything to do in Vietnam for Christmas? Asia has definitely bought into Christmas for the pure commercialistic value of the holiday (check out below if you don't believe me) but does anybody here actually care? It was the evening of December 24th and though some light Googling I had happened upon some vague information about Christmas Eve festivities at or around Notre Dame Cathedral in the center of the city. So we got in a cab and told the driver to head over!
We were driving overnight and I was doing my best to sleep but it was tough with our bus driver trying to break some sort of land speed record on the winding, bumpy mountain roads. It didn’t help that I had to twist and mangle my long white-person legs into terrible positions to fit into my seat in the first place. We made it to Mù Cang Chải a little bit before sunrise. This town would serve as our ‘base camp.’
When I woke up I was instantly confronted with one of the more ridiculous landscapes that I have ever seen. Green, mossy giants shot abruptly up out of the earth all around me as our bus weaved down a narrow road. We were also arriving in a dense fog, which made the whole thing a little more dramatic.
